


The Worst Time of Year for a Revolution

by goldfinch



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Car Sex, Drunken Confessions, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Riots, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 00:44:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4856720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elliot’s so caught up wondering <em>why why why</em> that there’s no time to actually ask the question. He’s too busy packing his shirts, and making sure he has enough socks, and his toothbrush, and his laptop. As an afterthought, he grabs the glasses he found in Tyrell’s car and slides them into his duffel, and then he’s done: that’s everything he needs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Worst Time of Year for a Revolution

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Heiner Müller's _Die Hamletmaschine._ This owes the play—particularly the radio play version—a huge debt.

In the quiet dark of his apartment, it's easy enough for Elliot to distance himself from what’s happening. He watches it on the local news feeds, and it's like footage from a war zone, or another planet; once the adrenaline burns through him he mostly just feels hollow. Mr. Robot won’t let him look away. Someone's set fire to a car in the Village and a stream of people are marching through downtown. WE'RE FINALLY FREE, their signs read. MONEY IS DEAD. They're showing reruns of a video he doesn't remember recording.

He hasn’t heard himself sound like that—so confident, so full of conviction—since his first few sessions with Krista. The ones where he yelled. This should be the happiest moment of his life, but he has all the major newspapers’ twitter feeds open in one browser and he’s already counted two deaths in New York City alone. Add that to the live-broadcast suicide of Angela’s new boss, and that makes three. Who even knows how many have been injured, here or abroad. Estonia. Lithuania. Russia. Police aren’t kind anywhere. The world isn’t kind anywhere.

His right hand is shaking on the mouse.

Elliot looks at it, and then at the screen, at the images flickering across it. They’ve started smashing windows downtown. Someone hefts what looks like a Molotov cocktail.

“We did this,” Mr. Robot says in his ear. “ _You_ did this. It’s a huge accomplishment, Elliot.” Onscreen, the man tosses his flaming bottle through a window, the crack of glass lost in the shouting.

“I know that. What’s your point?”

“You should be proud.”

But really it was just a relief to have someone telling him what to do. Leaving Times Square through a crush of people, none of whom had really seen him, he was so full of despair he hadn’t been able to stop himself from crying. It still hasn’t left him. He feels more alone now than ever, and he’s never been good on his own. He might be slaved to a different kind of master than the rest of society, but a master is a master whether it’s money or your own head leading you on. Whether it’s social pressure or economic; peer or corporate.

“I am,” he says over his doubt. He isn’t. But he knows it’s what Mr. Robot wants to hear.

From behind him, there’s a sharp knock at the door. Fives times; quickly. Maybe, Elliot thinks vaguely, standing up, moving across the room like he’s underwater, maybe it’s the police. It isn’t. It’s Krista, upset but dry-eyed, lips pressed firmly together.

“Um,” he says. “You’re not who I was expecting.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so.” She stands there until Elliot turns and does something with his body that looks enough like an invitation for her to step in, past him, into the room. He can feel her judging him. The tumble of unwashed laundry, Querty’s slightly neglected water. At least he doesn’t have any morphine out. At least Darlene’s still taking care of Flipper.

“I came by yesterday, but you weren’t here,” she says, still facing the living room. The fabric of her dress pulls a little as she crosses her arms, and Elliot stares blankly at the space between her shoulder blades, his mind racing. If he says he was out with someone, she’ll ask who it was, and if he talked, what he said, how he felt. Questions he can’t answer without lying even more. But there’s no way she’d believe he was asleep in Evil Corp’s ex-CTO’s backseat, either, not without things getting… really awkward.

“Sorry,” he says eventually, so quickly it feels like a mistake. “I was here, I just—needed to be alone. I didn’t know it was you.”

She takes a deep breath; he can see her ribs expand. “You didn’t just hack me, did you.” Her arms are still crossed when she turns to face him.

Uh. “I told you—“

“I mean, you don’t just hack people to get to know them, like you said.”

People. Individuals. His heartbeat settles a little. Some emotion pulls at her mouth and Elliot knows from her voice when she speaks that this isn’t about the Evil Corp hack at all; it’s about something personal—probably Michael Hanson. Or whatever his name is. Elliot eases himself down onto the couch, his knees angled toward the opposite wall. He hasn’t told her about anything bigger. But then, he’s actually been lying to her for most of their sessions. Lying about what he did, and what he knew, and where he went. Lying about taking his meds, about the hallucinations, about the work and the job offer and the hack he pulled off that’s probably going to destroy the world. That might be destroying the world as they stand here, right now, talking about small-time shit like this.

“You’re not just trying to make yourself feel less alone,” she says, “which, you’re right, I do understand—but even with Michael…. You were trying to protect me, I get that. But you invaded my life and my relationships—and _his_ life and relationships—and no matter how good your intentions were, it wasn’t your place to do that. Just because you feel relegated to the margins of the world doesn’t mean you have the right to—to right its wrongs.”

“That doesn’t excuse what they do,” Elliot says, baffled. He thought Krista, of all people, would have understood. She’s spent enough time with him. But Angela grew up with him and she’s working for Evil Corp now, so maybe the two aren’t mutually inclusive after all.

“No, you’re right,” Krista says.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Hacking people is an arrestable offense. If they find out—”

“Are you going to turn me in?”

Her mouth opens, but she doesn’t speak. She pauses. She looks at him, then shakes her head. Behind her, the door swings slowly, silently open. “I don't know. I haven’t decided yet.”

Elliot tilts his head a little, looking past her shoulder. His eyes are dry with how hard he’s trying to see, and even now he isn’t sure if it’s real or inside his head. “Krista,” he says slowly, “do you—“

Tyrell. Jesus fucking Christ it’s Tyrell. It’s real. Is it real? He’s holding what looks like a lawn ornament, a stone rabbit holding up a sign, or a scroll, and when he raises a finger to his lips, god. It’s so much like the first time he came in that a sick flash of deja-vu rolls through Elliot, head-to-toe. His grip on the sofa is tight enough to hurt.

“I want you to tell me everything,” Krista says, and then—

He actually sees her eyes roll up when Tyrell drops the lawn ornament, her irises slivered crescents as she crumples. Elliot’s too surprised to even try to catch her, and once she’s down—one arm splayed, one bent awkwardly beneath her—he just stares up at Tyrell, wide-eyed. “What the fuck.”

Tyrell’s in a suit, maybe even the same suit he was wearing on Friday, but unlike Elliot’s lived-in hoodie his clothes look well cared-for, even fresh. “You just destroyed billions of lives,” he says, dropping the statue to the floor with a dull, heavy thud, then dusting his hands off on his trousers. “One life destroyed a little more thoroughly than the others isn’t going to make a difference.”

“She didn’t deserve _that_!”

Tyrell makes a brief, dismissive noise. “She was a problem. Are you angry?”

“Yes I’m _angry_! Now it’s gonna look like I hit her over the head with a lawn ornament because she found out I hacked her boyfriend!“

“You’d better come with me, then.” He glances around the room, briefly, then looks back toward Elliot. “Where _is_ my car, by the way? I didn’t see it out front.”

_I—_

“What?”

“You borrowed it on Friday. Three days ago. What did you do with it?”

Fuck. There’s so much he doesn’t know. “I—it’s parked downtown. Or—maybe not, actually; the guy said he was going to have it towed.“

“ _Jävlar_. What’s the name of the lot?”

“I don’t know. It’s the one on the corner of West 146th and 44th. I didn’t see what company they use. I can find out, though, if you give me a minute.“

“No. I’ll call them myself.” He’s already busy on the phone—looking up the lot, most likely—and Elliot turns away, staring at Krista’s unconscious body. Fuck. He hopes she’s only unconscious. Her hair’s fallen over her face and he thinks, briefly, about brushing it back, but then he’d have to touch her for at least a second. Probably better if he doesn’t, anyway, just in case. He pulls his hands into his lap, sits back on his heels. Then, idly, looks toward the kitchen. Tyrell’s standing impatiently next to the oven, phone pressed to one ear; as Elliot watches he snaps, “Yes, fine, thank you very much,” in about the most sarcastic voice ever, and takes two quick steps toward him.

“Give me one of your sweatshirts,” Tyrell says, tossing his phone on the desk. It clatters against the keyboard, and Elliot stares at it, silent. The charge light’s gone from green to yellow.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because if I go out looking like this I’ll be lynched. Elliot.” He makes a brief, exasperated noise. “Never mind, I’ll find one myself.”

Footsteps. The sound of the closet door squeaking open. Elliot closes his eyes and listens to the hangers rattle together, plastic on plastic, and then the soft rustle of fabric. When he looks up Tyrell’s in an old grey hoodie, the one with the chewed-on drawstrings. It’s a little small on him, but it makes him look harmless, somehow, even when Elliot knows he strangled a woman with his bare hands. Elliot’s never seen him in anything other than a suit.

Tyrell sees him staring, and raises an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

“You look fine. Like a regular oblivious asshole. Except for the shoes.” Elliot glances at the closet. “I think I’ve got a pair of flip-flops.”

Tyrell lifts his arm in an eloquent gesture: do what you will.

A few minutes later he’s ordering Elliot to pack some things, and Elliot’s so caught up wondering _why why why_ that there’s no time to actually ask the question. He’s too busy packing his shirts, and making sure he has enough socks, and his toothbrush, and his laptop. As an afterthought, he grabs the glasses he found in Tyrell’s car and slides them into his duffel, and then he’s done: that’s everything he needs. When he’s finished zipping it up he slings the whole thing over his shoulder, and crouches to arrange Krista a little more comfortably. He wants to leave her a note or something, just to apologize, but Tyrell’s already out the door.

He touches her, briefly, just long enough to brush her hair back. “Sorry, I guess,” he tells her upturned face, and then steps over her.

 

 

 

 

The subway station smells like dust and weed, like accumulated grime and rainwater. There are a handful of other people there, and Elliot feels conspicuous in his three-day-old clothes, with Tyrell jittery and strange beside him. They watch two trains pass, and then Tyrell pulls him onto a Manhattan-bound R. “I thought we were going to the towing company,” Elliot says, resenting the way Tyrell keeps a hold of him until the doors close and they’re sitting down, as though he’s afraid Elliot will run, as though Elliot hasn’t spent the last twelve hours searching for him with an intensity that bordered on desperation.

There’s no one too suspicious in their car, but Tyrell still casts an anxious glance in either direction, and lowers his voice. “I was told the towing company they use has temporarily suspended services,” he says. “Which really means the lot can’t pay anyone to come out and move cars. It’s a cash-only economy now. Incidentally, how much do you have on you?”

“Um. Maybe fifty? I’ve got about five hundred back at my apartment—“

Tyrell shakes his head once, sharply. “No. We can’t go back. I have five thousand; that will have to be enough.”

Who the fuck carries around five thousand in cash, is what Elliot wants to ask, and then: why does he need that much on hand? But he doesn’t say anything. He keeps his mouth shut. He stares at the tunnel lights rushing past the windows.

Downtown, there’s not a car in sight except the NYPD Interceptors in the distance. These streets belong to the pedestrians. When he was here earlier it was loud, but peaceful enough; now all he can think about is the man on the news he watched throw a Molotov cocktail through a window. A few people have bullhorns and everyone else is singing and yelling, everything running together; their noise has the regular rhythm of something memorized. It’s a little like being swept up into the sea. Barely three steps from the station exit Tyrell just grabs him and starts pulling him along again, elbowing people aside, such an ugly look on his face when he turns back Elliot’s hardly surprised no one’s making more of a fuss. Tyrell might be wearing one of Elliot’s hoodies and flip-flops a size too small, but he’s still dangerous. Desperate people always are.

Which is part of the problem, in the end. Elliot hid who he was through necessity, but the people around him have just taken what he made and replicated it like it’s something from a youtube video or movie, something without meaning or anything more than momentary relevance. They’ll be posting and reposting pictures of this on tumblr, on instagram, on youtube and vimeo. Rows and rows of rosy cheeks, of mustaches, of black staring eyes.

Someone’s passing the masks out, even, and suddenly Elliot’s holding onto one too, just so he won’t drop it. It’s a face he knows well. He pokes his thumbs through the eyeholes, glances around, then slides the elastic over his head. _Snap_. Immediately, he’s invisible. Or, he feels invisible. Same thing. He feels in less danger, like this. Less like himself. A woman wanders by, unmasked, a trickle of blood running down her forehead but her face full of joyful hatred, and Elliot’s sure that, under the masks, everyone else has the same expression.

“Was it 44th or 46th?” Tyrell yells at the corner, his voice weirdly muffled.

“44th and 146th!”

Around them, the crowd surges toward something down the street. The hand on his arm tightens, then, and when Tyrell turns back Elliot sees, with an ugly start, that he’s wearing a mask too. This is the face he saw onscreen that morning. A person that wasn’t quite a person at all. What’s happened to Tyrell? Panicking, the urgency he’d felt earlier that day roaring back—where is he? Where is he? Somehow Elliot’s looking at himself, same white hair, same cheshire cat grin and he can smell the stink of his fear, the stink of his hate; the ground slips away beneath him and he stumbles. “Wait,” he says, dizzy. “Wait.”

“We can’t, Elliot.”

Elliot. He reaches for the name like he’s drowning, uses it to pull himself back into himself. _Elliot. That’s me. And you’re Tyrell Wellick. I was looking for you, but you found me instead._

The car door closes. It shuts out most of the sound, and Elliot tears the mask from his face so violently he leaves a long red scratch along his jawline, where the plastic caught and he kept pulling. The car’s smell is familiar—not Tyrell’s, but something close: leather, new paper, old coffee. Tyrell is walking in front of the car, pulling off his own mask as he goes. There’s a police line moving forward down the block, but he’s walking purposefully, without fear, as though he’s only on his way to fire someone. He looks like himself again.

Elliot focuses on breathing.

Tyrell slides into the car with another blast of sound—“We’re finally free! We’re finally free!”—and then pulls the door shut. “Alright,” Tyrell says, turning the key. Under his feet Elliot feels the engine’s answering vibration, calm and low as a big cat purring. “Let’s get out of here.”

They pull out quickly, straight over the curb, and then Tyrell wrenches the car around in a sharp, sudden turn, going so fast Elliot slides left against the center console. They head north, through the upper west side. Mid-value homes and businesses, red-faced buildings, only a little spray paint, the GW Bridge rising up through the dark open spaces of sky. It’s lit up on both levels, the suspension wires strung out like Christmas lights across the water. On the other side: New Jersey.

“Where are we going?” Elliot asks.

“Adirondack Park. One of the E-Corp executives has a vacation home there.”

“He won’t be there?”

Tyrell’s eyes are hard; his mouth is hard; Elliot can see his knuckles turning white from how tightly he’s gripping the steering wheel. Nerves, probably. But what are they running from? There’s a dry amusement in Tyrell’s voice when he speaks, but the look on his face doesn’t change. “This isn’t really the time for upper management to go on vacation.”

Elliot breathes. He’s okay. “Yeah, well, Gorbachev was on holiday in Foros when Moscow staged a coup.”

Tyrell turns another corner, less sharply this time, and the GW Bridge swings fully into view. The second, lower level is dark even in the daytime, but now it’s pitch black, relieved only by the yellow glow of street lamps. “E Corp executives don’t take vacations,” Tyrell says in that same dryly amused voice. “Or, if they do, there’s always someone equally qualified to take over in their absence. We are, as you’ve witnessed, largely replaceable.”

“Even you?”

Tyrell’s jaw clenches. “Obviously.”

They drive the rest of the bridge in silence, coming out into nine o’clock traffic in New Jersey and the same New York City purple sky overhead. The traffic doesn’t last, this time of night, and by the time Elliot’s lost sight of the city in the rearview mirror they’re going a solid seventy miles an hour on the 87, north along the Hudson River. After the first six or so exits Elliot stops recognizing town names; he loses track of where they are, of where New York is, of how far they’ve come from home. Whenever he turns his head too far to the left he can see the mask he threw into the backseat, staring at him. Deep black eyes, sinister black mouth. He hasn’t seen anyone following them—men in suits or otherwise—but there’s still a buzzing sense of uneasy paranoia at the base of his skull.

“What are you afraid of,” he asks. It seems the most relevant question, but he can’t hack himself. Not so cleanly, anyway. He'd be liable to leave blood and bone fragments behind, the broken pieces of his fingernails where he dug the memories out of his skull. Maybe not even then.

There’s a gas station coming up on the left. A convenience store, a little diner with a red awning out front. '50s style adverts in the windows; Marilyn Monroe; Elvis Presley, high black pompadour of hair. There’s one car in either lot, and no more.

“What about your wife? Don’t you want to bring her with you?” Nothing. “I met her, you know. Briefly. She seemed, um.”

“She must not have been trying very hard.” Tyrell’s not looking at Elliot, but he’s not looking at the road, either. Just out there, somewhere, at something in the middle distance. “Just after our son was born, Joanna informed me she no longer wanted me. She said if I wanted to stay in the family, I had to fix what I’d done.” Something in his jaw clenches and ticks. “I can’t fix it. And I can’t fix what you did, either.”

“I didn’t—“

“You did. You promised me you wouldn’t and then you did.”

“It’s not that simple, I—“

“Elliot—”

“It was a mistake.”

“You’re right about something today, at least.”

It’s mean, but the meanness born of frustration, and Elliot just rolls his eyes, thinks of how much he can’t explain, right now. Somewhere there are words that would make everything make sense, even if they couldn’t make things right. Tyrell pulls into the gas station, snapping at Elliot to stay in the car, then strides straight into the store. “Get me some Parliments!” Elliot calls after him. He’s in there for a while. When he comes back out it’s with a pack of cigarettes, which he tosses into Elliot’s lap, and a granola bar, which he eats quickly and without relish as he waits for the tank to fill.

An unfamiliar ring tone starts up, not long after. Tyrell’s. Elliot watches him dig it out of his pocket, check the screen; he watches his face change. Tyrell says something angry in Swedish and then hurls the phone out past the lights into the wild grass; above, a bird startles silently up out of a tree.

When he climbs back into the car he doesn’t say anything, and Elliot doesn’t say anything. The road is dark, and the radio’s off; Elliot leans his head against the window and listens to the wheels turn. It’s a comforting sound, one he doesn’t hear very often. He always takes the subway, and the city’s too loud, the whole world is too loud. Advertisements, movies, logos, people. He wishes he could stand it. He wishes things were different, that he didn’t need so much, that he was happier, that—that—that—

“You’re running away too,” he realizes.

Tyrell’s answer is sharp and immediate. “I’m _not_ —“

“No, it’s okay. I get it. Really. I mean, me, I thought….” He looks out the window, at the trees whipping past. “I thought the hack would change things.”

“It did. That’s the problem.”

“But not the way I wanted. Not for me.” And what was the point, if he doesn’t even remember the execution? Even if it had turned out exactly the way he’d planned, would it have mattered? He wasn’t responsible, not really. Not in the end. He hid his face; he made himself, if possible, even more alone. He turns his face against the glass, and almost laughs to recognize the irony: “I don’t even remember why I did it.”

“You single-handedly took down the largest conglomerate on the planet. Isn’t that reason enough?”

Single-handedly. Ha. “What, you mean like, because it’s there?” Tyrell nods. “Nah. I don’t—work that way.”

“Ah yes. You _care_ about the people.”

“I wanted to help them.” Elliot can see the ghost of his reflection in the glass, laid over the images of trees. He can’t see anyone else. Not Tyrell, not his dad, not his mother. Just him. “I wanted to—be like them.”

“You shouldn’t. Most people are weak. They’re complacent and afraid; they give up too easily.” Tyrell looks over at him, eyes bright. “You aren’t anything like that. You succeed. When I realized what you were trying to do—” His mouth opens, pauses. “It was beautiful. The whole thing. You’re the best coder, the best hacker I’ve ever met; when I saw you I thought, ‘I want….’”

But he doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead his eyes flick down a little and there’s an odd, breathless silence. Then the car comes to a swift stop on the shoulder, and Elliot barely has time to turn to ask “What the hell?” before Tyrell’s mouth is on his and he’s kissing him. And Elliot, more out of reflex than anything else, is kissing back. When Shayla told him never to ask before he kissed someone, he’s fairly sure this isn’t what she meant. Tyrell’s mouth is stupidly soft but Elliot can feel their teeth clicking together with how hard Tyrell’s pressing against him; it’s a hard, demanding kiss, and at some point Tyrell must have taken off his seatbelt because now he’s climbing over the center console and his whole body is pressed against Elliot’s—he’s practically sitting in his lap, and when Elliot realizes it his hands sort of spasm, not pushing him off but not pulling him closer, either. And then Tyrell’s palm presses abruptly against his crotch.

“Oh shit,” Elliot gasps. His head slams back against the headrest and then he winces because, okay, so it’s been a while since he last had sex but that’s just em _barr_ assing. He’s not even hard.

He is about fifteen seconds later, though, once Tyrell’s slithered very awkwardly into the footwell and taken Elliot’s dick in his mouth. Oh yeah. Then he’s hard. Since he’s gotten off morphine his body has felt raw and strange, as though all his skin’s been peeled back. It almost hurts.

Tyrell doesn’t swallow, just pushes at the door with one hand and opens his mouth over the pavement. Then he presses their faces together, his eyes so close they’re out of focus. So blue they’re almost white. “When I saw you,” he whispers, “it was like seeing God.”

 _I was your prophet; you were supposed to be my god._ Mr. Robot’s words, thrown in Elliot’s face in Times Square, under the bright lights of the capitalist dream. They sound so different now, whispered in the dark, Tyrell’s hands cool against his face.

“I—”

They’re sitting so close. He can feel Tyrell’s weight, pressing him down. It isn’t claustrophobic, but he can’t say anything: can’t make his mouth work. Eventually Tyrell slides off of him, and climbs back into the driver’s seat. The look he gives Elliot then isn’t ugly, or even disappointed; he doesn’t look understanding, or gentle, or pleased, either though. Satisfied, maybe. And still a little awestruck. It’s a strange look to see on his face. It reminds Elliot of the expression he wore when he told Elliot about murdering that woman. What was it he said? Something so simple, affecting such change?

The air in the car is still and comfortable, and Elliot doesn’t feel he has to say anything at all if he doesn’t want to. He can just sit here, warm and loose-bodied, head back, watching the trees pass, the signs for towns he doesn’t know: Catskill, Ravena, Albany. That one he knows. This is the same route he took to get to Steel Mountain, but he doesn’t remember much of the drive. The landscape changes and rises; the sky closes up under the trees. The road turns winding and small, and then Tyrell turns into a driveway, and shuts the engine off, and they both climb out of the car.

Trees lean in on either side of the house, just visible in the lights that have come on in the driveway. Elliot’s never been out here before—their family wasn’t really the sort to take vacations, even after Darlene was born—and it’s oddly soothing. They’re just trees, really. But the air smells like plants and water and living things, and when he logs onto his computer inside, he finds out the internet is fast as shit, too.

“I like this place,” he murmurs, looking over the new headlines. It’s more of the same, really. Murder and mayhem. He pulls up Facebook, logging in under Krista’s name, and finds she’s gotten to a hospital, or at least her phone; her sister’s sent her a private message saying, _Be there soon_ , timestamped two hours ago. Figures. The world’s falling apart and Facebook’s still the preferred method of communication.

“I see you’ve settled in.” Tyrell’s voice, from across the room and then closer, “Find anything interesting?”

“Krista’s okay, I think. Did you?”

“Only a 1975 Romanée-Conti Grand Cru,” he says, placing a full glass on the desk. Elliot turns his head a little, sees another in Tyrell’s hand. “It was the most expensive wine I could find down there, and trust me, that’s saying something.”

He runs a quick google search for Romaneé-Conti Grand Cru, then, just because he has the internet right there, and feels his eyes go wide at the price. Four thousand euros a bottle to start, and it’s gone for up to twenty thousand at auction depending on the year. That’s more than two year’s rent. “Um.”

“Have as much as you like,” Tyrell says smugly. “I am going to bed.”

Elliot’s already turned back toward the computer—news feeds, Facebook, Evil Corp’s twitter, the New York Times Business section, something Tyrell’s saying, he’s saying, “Yeah. Fine. Leave the wine; it’s good.”

He hasn’t had anything to eat all day—hasn’t had anything to eat in three days that he can remember—and he’s buzzed by the time he’s halfway through the glass. When he’s finished it, he’s just drunk enough that it’s getting hard to concentrate on the screen, so he shuts everything down and logs out. Pours himself another glass of wine. It really is good. Not twenty thousand dollars good—that’s just brand prestige—but definitely the best wine Elliot ever remembers drinking.

He hadn’t turned any of the lights on, and now, with his computer shut down, the living room is dark and cavernously huge. A set of wooden stairs leads up under a mounted deer head, antlers somehow multiplied in the shadows. He hasn’t been anywhere but the living room and suddenly the rest of the house seems to stretch out and out into the distance, an endless number of rooms, but he’s a little drunk and Tyrell’s out there somewhere, so he takes his wine and trudges up the stairs.

There are, in fact, a lot of rooms. Bedrooms, an extravagantly expensive-looking home office, a library with gold leaf on the edges of some of the pages like Bibles, cool wood-paneled walls, the faint scent of potpourri, a miraculous lack of dust. They must have a housekeeper. That’s something else to worry about. And then Elliot opens a door at the end of the hall and sees Tyrell stretched out on the bed.

Elliot swallows another mouthful of wine. A big mouthful. He sways a little, and grabs for the doorjamb.

“Tell me what happened when I wasn’t there,” he says, but of course Tyrell’s asleep. His hair’s less particularly combed, now, but his mouth is closed and he looks like he’s thinking about something, some difficult problem. Another difficult problem: the hack. It was ostensibly successful but it was also a complete failure. The world has not responded the way Elliot expected. He, himself, has not responded the way he hoped, back in the early days when he didn’t know the truth behind any of this. And then there was that afternoon, in the graveyard and then on the train, when he knew everything. When he thought maybe they shouldn’t do it. That was what he told Darlene. And then he went and did it anyway. Or, a part of him did, which must mean he still believed in the cause. And then Tyrell—Tyrell—

Elliot turns back into the hallway, before he can do something he’ll regret. He goes back down the stairs, under the branching shadows of the antlers, to a big couch that curls up into tight dark arms and the smell of leather, where he collapses at last and sleeps without dreaming.

 

 

 

 

He wakes up alone, sober enough again to realize he left his glass in another room. He has also, in the night, kicked all the cushions off the couch. The house is quiet. He can hear birdsong outside, something high and long and not at all like the city’s sparrows, but the house is quiet. The house is quiet.

He lurches upright, adrenaline roaring through him. All of a sudden he feels nauseous, a sickness roiling in his stomach that’s only partly to do with the wine. Quick, Elliot: what do you remember? Krista, his apartment, Times Square and then the drive out, the gas station—he remembers everything. But his mouth is dry and sour-tasting and he doesn’t have the best track record, really; his memory’s no reliable proof at all. He pushes himself up and across the living room, down the hallway. Tell me it was real. Tell me he’s there.

But Tyrell’s gone. Or rather, the bedroom is empty, the bed made, nothing out of place. The air smells like potpourri and laundry, but there’s a wineglass on the dresser—Elliot’s wineglass, he realizes, staring at it. He must have left it here last night.

“Tyrell?” he yells, once, then listens to the silence that comes after.

Nothing.

 _No_ , he thinks. _No._

Before Mr. Robot, he used to get lonely all at once, something that fell on him like a ton of bricks. It hits him now in that same way, dropping him to the floor right there in the doorway, the way he hadn’t been able to let himself do in the graveyard—yesterday? Was it only yesterday? No. Four days ago, now. It’s just that he’s still missing the time in between. He hadn’t known—and now Tyrell’s still—

Then he’s just sobbing, head down in his arms, his legs pulled up as though protecting his body will do anything to protect his mind, or the aching pulp of his heart. With his head back against the doorjamb, the space he’s in is almost small enough to offer comfort, but the ache in his chest doesn’t go away. He’s alone. He’s still alone.

“Kiddo, you’re not.”

“Fuck you.” He can feel Mr. Robot’s hands on his shoulders, but that too is an illusion, a trick, a lie. “If you care about me so much, then tell me what happened. Tell me what I did.”

“You saved the world.”

“Did I kill him? Did I—“

“I told you. You already know.”

But he doesn’t, not really. And it isn’t just what he did over the weekend, either, it’s what he thought he did yesterday; it’s what, if he was imagining Tyrell, he must really have done himself. Krista. The five thousand dollars. The blowjob on the side of the road. Christ. Whose house is this?

“Elliot?”

Elliot’s head snaps up. That wasn’t Mr. Robot. That was—

He scrambles to his feet, making it halfway down the hallway before he manages to slow himself down. The hallway lights are off and he’s used to the darkness; the living room seems too bright when he comes down the stairs. Sunlight spilling in through the windows, over the dark wood, the carpet, through to the kitchen on the other side of the room. Over the shoulders of the man now lifting grocery bags onto the kitchen island. Tyrell’s in a blue pin-striped shirt, not a work outfit, but the disparate parts of it. There’s no tie around his neck; he’s wearing good shoes but khakis instead of suit pants. He has the radio on in the kitchen, some political personality Elliot doesn’t recognize who speaks stridently, as though he understands. “It’s a question of overthrowing all social relations, in which we as human beings are—”

“Where the fuck were you?”

Tyrell looks up. “I had to get food,” he says slowly. “They don’t keep their refrigerator stocked when they aren’t here.” He gives Elliot a lingering, sideways look. “Are you alright? Do you want some eggs, or a bagel? They didn’t have any good pastries at the supermarket, but I did stop for coffee. I remember you drinking a latte.”

Oh. “Um. Yeah,” Elliot says. He probably looks terrible. It’s probably very obvious that he’s been crying. “Eggs. Bagel. I’ll um, take both.” He’s still shaking, the backwash of terror and grief against his wrists, his arms, his heart. He lowers himself onto one of the bar stools at the island. “What’s the plan?”

Tyrell’s poured himself a glass of orange juice, and drinks it as he lifts a half-carton of eggs from one of the bags. “Well, I’m sorry to say I didn’t have much of one, beyond this. I just had to get you out of the city. There were rumors that—well. You must have seen E Corp’s broadcast.”

Broadcast? “What?”

“Late last night. It aired just before I came by.” Tyrell’s gaze is surprised and a little suspicious. “I’m amazed you didn’t see it—it was on all the major networks.”

No kidding. Elliot’s surprised too, and not for the first time he wonders if he’s lost more time than he knows. Did Mr. Robot keep the broadcast from him, too? And if so, why? “What did they say?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. Not to worry, they were working to fix it, even teaming up with some companies in China where the data storage facilities were hit—it was all much more convincing than Jason’s five minutes of fame, of course, but—“ He sinks briefly into silence, his gaze still fixed on Elliot, but when he starts speaking again Elliot knows, somehow, that Tyrell isn’t really looking at him. There’s a vacancy in his eyes; a distance. “You know Phillip Price, I assume. Or you know of him, rather. He’s never been the type to panic—I can imagine him sitting very calmly at his desk while the world literally burns down around him, if it ever came to that—but—” he tilts his head, very slightly, an inquisitive bird on a fencepost— “the look on his face then…. He wasn’t even _annoyed_.”

“So you think the hack didn’t work.”

“I think, for some reason, they don’t care that it worked. The problem is, the way you explained it to me, there’s no way they can block it, or recover afterward. Even with all the resources they have, it is, simply, _impossible_. They don’t have the key.”

“That’s the part I don’t understand. You were going to give it to them.”

Tyrell shakes his head. “They wouldn’t see me. I tried.”

“What does that mean.”

“Well it was probably because of—” he waves a hand—“what’s her name, Sharon, isn’t it?”

“The woman you killed.”

“Yes, yes, the woman I killed. I shouldn’t have done it, of course, because it ruined everything, I just—when I was watching her die….” He trails off, then his voice goes dry. “Once she was actually dead, things got a little more complicated.”

“Do you think they know? Evil Corp, I mean?”

“Probably. But they can’t prove it. And I don’t think they really care, either, it’s just that it’s bad publicity. Because I was good. I was very good. I was the youngest person to be even interim CTO in the history of the company.” He sinks into a bitter silence, turning back to the stove, the cracked eggs. Elliot smells the rubbery sweetness as they cook, and under the radio he eventually hears Tyrell humming along to the music, just loud enough to make out. Elliot doesn’t know the words, but he recognizes the melody; it’s been on the radio in Allsafe’s break room recently. He lays his head down on his arms on the island and closes his eyes. He listens. Tyrell Wellick, who believes serving people is beneath him, slides the bagels and a plate of eggs across the granite.

“There’s pepper and salt in the cupboards somewhere, I’m sure. You can find it yourself.”

The food’s good, but simple. Not like the lunch they had at Evil Corp and not like what Tyrell probably usually eats either, but it’s fancier than the cereal Elliot has for breakfast, the Pop Tarts, the ready-mades. He doesn’t bother with salt or pepper, though it could use a little of both. “What did you want to do today, then,” he asks when he’s done, poking at the last bit of eggs. The swell of relief hasn’t left him entirely. Who knows what’s going to change, in this brave new world of theirs? For the first time, he feels hopeful.

“Everything’s been taken care of in New York?” Tyrell asks.

The hack, he means. "Yeah. Yeah, it’s done. The encryption finished this morning.” He pushes the eggs to the edge of his plate, then pulls them back again. Evil Corp’s working with people in China, Tyrell said. That’s interesting. “Did they say they were working with the Chinese government?”

“No, the company that owns the data centers. I forget the name, something in Chinese.”

It hardly matters. Even if E Corp _was_ working with the Chinese government, even if whole world was working together and they had years to do it, they can’t decrypt the key now. It’s been deleted. Whether hacking Evil Corp was the right thing or not, it’s finished, and there’s nothing he or anyone can do. The only thing left is to keep going.

“You know, Scott has a boat,” Tyrell says, sliding a look across the island.

Scott, last name unknown, _does_ have a boat. Two boats, in fact. But the first doesn’t have any gas, and the second is a small wooden rowboat. When Scott goes out on it, he probably pays someone else to row it for him. They clamber in together, settling down on the benches, and each of them takes an oar. Tyrell pushes them out. Elliot’s never even been in a boat before but the idea of it isn’t hard. “You have to pull in time,” he says, once they’re on the water.

“I _am_ ,” Tyrell says, pulling completely out of time.

“Just give me the oar. I’ll do it.”

But Tyrell won’t, so mostly they turn in wide circles—eventually they make it out onto the lake. There are only two other houses in the immediate area and both of them are empty: lights off, curtains drawn. The rest of the shoreline is trees and green bushes, birds resting between the shallow waves. It looks like a nice place to have a dog. _Flipper._ And then, _Fuck, Qwerty._

Darlene still has Flipper, as far as he knows, but Qwerty hasn’t been fed for who knows how long. He pulls out his phone and finds Darlene’s name, glad now that she gave him her number. _Would you take care of Qwerty for me? And watch Flipper for a while longer?_

Maybe ten seconds later: _Sure._ Then, shortly after, _U missed the party u no. Whr the fuck r u?_

 _Out of town_ , he types baldly, then shoves the phone back into his pocket.

“Who’s that?” Tyrell asks, glancing over.

“My sister.”

“You have—” he makes a noise, _hm,_ then, “of course.”

Elliot looks at him.

“I just realized how little I know about you, is all. You have a sister. That’s… nice.”

Elliot didn’t know he had a sister either until recently. “I guess.” The silence drags. “I don’t really know her that well. We grew up together but—” He shrugs. He can’t explain without telling Tyrell everything, like how there are still huge swathes missing from his memory, and whole weeks he’s probably not even aware are gone. The mind fills in gaps on its own. The mind heals, but it’s incomplete, scabs stretched over a wound that’s festering underneath. Who knows what’s down there?

“I don’t have siblings, myself,” Tyrell says, something of the boardroom entering his voice, a tone of speech-making. “I don’t know that I would have liked it. Do you?”

Elliot shrugs. Darlene, who rode her bike in front of their house when they were kids. Darlene, who left after two years of college and never looked back. He doesn’t really know her at all anymore. Maybe that’s his fault, for not calling her, but how could he have, when he didn’t even know—“I guess it’s okay.”

“Hm.”

The water is slow and gentle against the sides of the boat. Like being rocked to sleep as a child. Except Elliot never had that sort of childhood, even when his dad was alive. His father, whom he loved, who pushed him out a window.

“What’s this?” Tyrell says, leaning forward to peer at Elliot’s arm.

Elliot flinches. He doesn’t wear short sleeves, even in summer, for a reason. This is why. He twists to poke at the edge of one of the scars with a finger. “…My mom. Sometimes she’d, um. Yeah.” He’s never had to explain before. Shayla understood without having to ask, and he’s made sure Angela’s never seen them. But Tyrell just makes a soft noise in the back of his throat, and then looks back out over the water.

“That kind of violence is pointless,” he says, like it’s a decree. “There’s nothing to be gained from hurting a child.”

“I don’t think she did it because she wanted anything from me.”

“No. Probably not.”

It was more, Elliot thinks now, that she was angry at the world, and hadn’t been a good person to begin with. And he knows he hadn’t been easy. Or, he can extrapolate from her cruelties. She said they were necessary, therefore….

“We should head in,” he says, curling to pick at a hangnail. “It’s gonna get dark soon.”

It isn't, really, but there’s so much open space here, even if the sunset is beautiful, even if Tyrell’s staring at him, and smiling. The water is calm enough that he can see reflections of clouds in the surface, and the first solemn stars between them like galaxies, pale purples and pinks, light from millions of lightyears away. In other places in the country, people are being beaten. In other parts of the world, people are dying.

Tyrell looks at him for a long time, something in his eyes Elliot can’t read at all. It’s not pity, or mockery, or dismissal, or anything Elliot would have expected. Eventually Tyrell nods. “Feel free to take both oars this time,” he says—teasing, Elliot realizes with a warm jolt of surprise.

 

 

 

 

Who is Tyrell Wellick? Elliot considers what he knows. Hubristic, ambitious, desperate, afraid—a bundle of contradictions, now that he’s killed a woman and left her on a rooftop. He doesn’t want to go to prison. Who does? But Elliot still can’t shake the idea that the Tyrell Wellick he hacked, the version that had been made available to him online, is somehow false. Like Shayla, who hadn’t put the most secret part of her on the internet, neither has Tyrell. _He cares what you think of him. He hates that he cares, but he does._ Is it that simple? It can’t be.

He has other clues now, other pieces of the puzzle that is Tyrell Wellick. But he can get more.

That next afternoon he sits down at his laptop and opens up a browser window. Traffic routed through Russia and Kazakhstan this time, untraceable, Elliot digs his fingers into Tyrell’s skin, wraps his hands around Tyrell’s waist. He wants to crack him open, and crawl inside his ribcage; he wants to live in Tyrell’s blood, curled up like an animal in sleep.

The facebook account and the old myspace are no more illuminating this time around, but his personal emails have gotten more interesting since he was fired. Some things from his assistant, some things from Evil Corp’s HR department. And an email from Joanna, sent to his work email. Elliot hesitates maybe half a second before he opens it.

It’s in Swedish, of course. Or Danish. Maybe Norwegian. He can’t tell the difference—but he doesn’t need to. He just copies the whole thing, and plugs it into google translate.

It comes through with a few awkward phrases, but not so many he can’t feel the cold rage behind it. He remembers the way she picked up the baby when they met, the perfect image she made: infant child, doting mother, neat brownstone house behind her—her husband the only thing missing. Her husband the only thing Elliot had to offer her. It had been calculated to elicit sympathy, and maybe it would have worked if he hadn’t been so suspicious already, if she hadn’t given off the cooly watchful air of a tiger coiled to strike. He’d been half afraid she was going to lash out and grab him by the throat, baby or no.

She mentions that meeting in the email, mostly to the gist of _I know that boy Ollie had something to do with you leaving_ and then goes on to remind Tyrell of his duty and to demand he return. And it _is_ a demand. She doesn’t sound at all worried, just coldly furious. Her words have been clipped of any emotional attachment whatsoever.

“What are you doing?”

He actually jumps when he hears Tyrell behind him. He’s used to being shut away in his apartment when he hacks people; he’s not used to having to worry about people sneaking up behind him. “I’m sorry. I just—I—“

Tyrell steps forward, out of the doorway—the light slides from his shoulders like a heavy coat, like something he has to hunch to keep on—he comes right up behind Elliot’s chair.

“Sorry,” Elliot says again. “I just—wanted to know. This is how I get to know people. I don’t just watch them; I hack them. I just wanted to know who you were.”

“I didn’t—“ Scanning the email, Tyrell leans back a little, as if someone punched him. That same reeling, disoriented look. “I didn’t know she sent this.”

“It was only this morning.”

Tyrell’s still staring at the screen. He says slowly, “I knew that this is what she would say.” He looks, Elliot thinks, like he’s thinking about going back. Or, like he thinks there’s no choice in it. She called him; now he has to go.

What must that be like, to love someone so much you don’t think of yourself first, or at all? Elliot loved Shayla, colorful bird of paradise that she was: “Promises like that matter to me Elliot, okay?” He only really had her for a month but he loved her. But he didn’t—that is, he didn’t love her the way Tyrell loves his wife: obediently. Did he even love the world, those faceless, enviable masses, when he tried to save them? Or was he only doing what he hoped was best for himself? At some level this had been his logic: if I set them free, then they will love me.

Tyrell leans away from the computer, still looking at the screen but now pulled back into himself, somehow. He looks present again. “I have to go back,” he says.

“Why?”

Tyrell’s gaze snaps down to meet his, and Elliot is struck again by how light his eyes are. How bright his face is. How clean. “Joanna asked me to,” he says, as though Elliot must be an idiot. But all Elliot can think is: she wasn’t asking. For some reason, that seems to matter.

“When are you gonna go?”

“Tomorrow. I have to,” Tyrell says, trying to explain himself, as though he has to tell Elliot anything. “I owe her.”

“People don’t work like that, though,” Elliot says passionately. “Your relationship with someone isn’t a tally of debt and obligation, and that’s not what love is either. That’s not what friendship is, or family. It’s not beating the will to resist out of a person until all they can do is nod and say, yes, I want you, yes, I’ll do what you say. If it is, then we’re no better than robots; we’re exactly the sort of mindless consumption machines corporations want us to be, following trends and fashions and memes in an endlessly repeating cycle, with no chance of escape. Is that really the kind of life you want?”

“Elliot?”

Elliot blinks. “What?”

“I asked you what you thought.”

Fuck. Not again. “Nothing,” he says, and looks away as he stands. He shoves his hands into his hoodie, heading out through the sliding doors onto the balcony. He can’t breathe, all of a sudden, but the cool air helps.

Tyrell stands in front of the computer for a while longer, then swears and retreats into another room. The next time Elliot sees him Tyrell’s diving into the water from the deck below. His form is perfect: body curved, head tucked between his arms, the dark slash of his hair puffed out over goggle straps. Once he’s in the water, all Elliot can see of him is the pale angle of his arms cutting through the lake’s surface and the white churn behind him as he kicks. He’s swimming pretty fast, but he’s moving too wildly, kicking too hard; his body turns without rhythm or care. He’s angry.

Elliot watches until Tyrell turns around, then goes inside. There’s nothing else to do here. There’s nowhere to go. If he were still in New York, if it were still last month or last week, even, he’d do a few lines of morphine or take the train down to Coney Island. But he didn’t bring any morphine, and Coney Island is too far away, and full of ghosts besides. Is anyone there now? Darlene, maybe? Darlene with her malware, her cigarettes and frozen yogurt, the way she rose yawning from a cot in the arcade’s back room. The gun Elliot never touched (that he remembers). Tyrell comes back into the house, and Elliot turns on the television for the ambient noise. Old cartoons, Pinkie and the Brain, things he watched when he was a kid, on weekends, in the back of the store when his dad was working.

When he turns to the news, the announcer is saying something. Elliot focuses, laboriously. His mind’s still among the dusty boxes, the cracked door, the Yankees on the radio, and it takes him a long time to understand what the woman is saying. Her voice sounds strange, too low, stretched-out somehow. What she’s saying can’t be right.

“E Corp has just announced the full recovery of information on its Chinese servers, CEO Phillip Price citing international co-operation as the deciding factor in this sudden twist. Beijing-based businessman Fu Bai, rumored to have been instrumental in the recovery of the data, was not available for comment, but sources in E Corp’s management are saying—”

This can’t be happening. This must be in his head. He stands and goes out to the balcony, the newscaster’s voice following him out. “Tyrell.” His voice is shaking, he knows; he can hear it; so’s his finger when he jabs it back toward the living room. “I need you to tell me if—” He stops, tries again. “There’s something on the tv I think you should see.”

Tyrell unfolds himself from the chair, eyes narrowed as he stalks past Elliot into the living room. He’s wearing a polo shirt now that Elliot thinks he might have seen in a Facebook photo before and his swimming trunks. He retrieves the remote from the couch and turns up the volume, and it’s still the same announcer saying the same things: that Evil Corp is back, that they saved the back-ups in China, that company stock is skyrocketing. Tyrell’s face doesn’t change. After a while he drops the remote, then turns and goes into the kitchen. He comes back with a bottle of vodka and two glasses held in one hand.

“Here,” he says, twisting open the bottle. Elliot holds out his hand for a glass. He’s only half paying attention, though; mostly he’s still looking at the television. They’re showing video of Times Square, full of people again, but very few of them are wearing masks. He still can’t tell if they’re happy.

“Bottoms up,” Tyrell says.

They drink. And then sit on the couch in front of the television, and keep drinking. Late afternoon light through the windows, gentle clink of glassware. There’s nothing inside Elliot’s head except shock and a renewed desire for morphine. Something to numb him up.

Eventually the news coverage turns to other things, though it always circles back to Evil Corp. The earthquake off the coast of Argentina, the wildfires just beginning to die out in California. Commercials for toilet paper and fast-food chains and clothing lines. Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Which of these men were not named Times “People of the Year?” A. Mao Zedong. B. Joseph Stalin. C. Ayatollah Khomeini. D. Adolf Hitler.

Christ. Is this really what people watch? It feels like his brain might actually be melting with how meaningless this show is. It’s nothing more than propaganda. Money and prizes: the consumption-struggle. The woman answering questions is middle-aged and excited, with a habit of touching her face when she’s thinking. She gets the question wrong. Guesses Hitler when it was Mao. That, too, figures. China has been cut off from the West in nearly all but the economic sense for decades; no one knows anything else about what goes on in that country. But he’s hardly surprised China agreed to work with Evil Corp, with all the money that’s tied up in their records and servers. In hindsight, it’s hardly a surprise that the Dark Army betrayed him. And it had to have been the Dark Army, because no one else had the key. They didn’t have the same goals as fsociety, either. They only wanted money.

Elliot himself, at least, hadn’t done it for that. And yet…. “Krista said I was hacking people for the wrong reasons,” he says, leaning across the couch. “What do you think?”

“Were you?” Tyrell swallows another mouthful of vodka, lifts an eyebrow. “Are you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, I was doing it for me, wasn’t I? I wanted to stop feeling so alone. I thought saving people would help me do that.”

“Except you didn’t save them, did you.”

“It didn’t make me feel less alone, either.” He thinks of his father’s ghost standing in Times Square, his mother, himself as a boy. His mother who used to press her cigarettes out against his skin when she was angry; his father, who pushed him out a window, telling Elliot he would be with him always. Himself when all he had known how to do was suffer.

In the corner of his eye, Tyrell swallows another glass of vodka. “I tried to sell the code back to E Corp,” Tyrell says suddenly. “You said to just give it to them but I tried to use it as a bargaining chip to get my job back—or, better, to get Scott Knowles’ job—but they didn’t want it. That’s what they actually said. Phillip Price looked me in the eye and told me they didn’t want it.” He takes another, bitter swig, this time straight from the bottle. “That they didn’t want me. I thought they were going to have me arrested, that’s why I ran, but—“ He cuts himself off, and his lips twist, and he shakes his head. His meaning is clear. “Well. Now I know why they could say no.”

“You’re better off somewhere else,” Elliot says. He’s not angry. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to be. He’s lost track of whether or not he wanted to execute the hack, of what he wanted to accomplish. Was it really to save the world, or just himself? It hasn’t done either of those things.

“I did everything I was supposed to,” Tyrell says. “I was everything they told me I should be.”

Elliot turns his head. “You told me once that all you have to do is be willing to take things. But sometimes I think—the taking of it ruins it. Or else it ruins you. I mean, you can’t take people. I can pick them apart but they don’t belong to me.” Maybe that’s what Krista was trying to say. “And I don’t belong to them either.” As much as he wanted to.

Tyrell reaches for the vodka bottle—two thirds empty when they started—and tilts the mouthful left into one corner of the bottle. “Damn it. Hold on.” He pushes himself up from the couch and walks surely toward the kitchen, like he isn’t drunk at all. Elliot watches him go, past the armchair and the bag laid out by the door, past the dividing line: living room, then kitchen. Elliot’s gaze snags on the bag, and he’s still staring at it when Tyrell finds another bottle—this time scotch—and starts making his way back. He doesn’t own Tyrell either but that doesn’t stop the wave of grief from rising up in him again. He hasn’t lost anything yet but he can see how it’ll happen.

Tyrell sets the scotch down on the table, twisting the top off and pouring himself another couple of fingers. He hasn’t sat down yet, which means Elliot doesn’t have to look at his face when he speaks. “Please don’t,” he says.

Tyrell blinks. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t go.” He holds his body still, trembling with the effort. His hands are fists in his lap. Tyrell is staring at him like he suddenly started speaking Chinese, but as Elliot watches his face smoothes out, then softens, and then he smiles.

“Alright,” he says.

“…That’s it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I kind of expected….”

“That I would make you beg?” Tyrell moves closer, pressing Elliot back against the couch cushions. He’s standing almost between his legs now, straight-backed and imperious. “Do you want me to make you beg, Elliot?”

“I um. No, not—not really.”

Tyrell descends like a lightning bolt, and Elliot thinks of Zeus, of god in a shower of gold, in the split second before Tyrell kisses him. He puts his hands up against Tyrell’s shirt, leans back a little more in the couch. Maybe, he thinks, opening his mouth, maybe this is all it takes. Maybe all he ever had to do was ask.

 

 

 

 

The television’s still going—a commercial for some new Axe body spray that Elliot’s not listening to—nothing but background noise and flickering light behind his closed eyes. He’s still leaning mostly against Tyrell’s chest, too pleased and tired to pull away even if the closeness is making him itch a little. Sex relaxes him, but doesn’t cure his anxiety; even with Shayla he’d had to nudge her to the other side of the bed afterward, like she was some kind of stranger. He’ll have to sit up in a minute or so.

He waits until he’s practically twitching, then pushes himself upright and reaches for his cigarettes.

Beside him Tyrell’s eyes flutter open. “Leaving already?”

“No, just.” He holds up the cigarettes.

“You don’t need to go outside,” Tyrell says, an oddly smug tone creeping into his voice. “No one will mind if you smoke in here. In fact, from now on, I insist you always smoke indoors.” He leans forward, smiling, and plucks a cigarette from the pack.

“I didn’t know you smoked."

“Oh, I don’t.” Tyrell makes a face at the taste, but breathes out a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling.

There are still mysteries, Elliot thinks, watching the smoke rise, watching Tyrell’s face as he inhales again. But their fingers brush when Elliot reaches for the lighter, Tyrell’s hand lingering on his. This is human contact, unforced, unhurried. They must be doing alright. They must be doing okay. Neither of them owns the other but Elliot lets Tyrell light his cigarette for him, and looks away when he smiles.

“You said you hack people to get to know them,” Tyrell says after a moment. Elliot nods. “Well,” Tyrell says, “if that was true, you don’t have to hack me again if you don’t want to. I give you my permission. Ask me anything.”

Elliot blinks. Is he serious? He can’t be serious. “I don’t think I understand.”

“What have you wondered about? What were you hoping to find? That certain weakness, that flaw, the hole in my system? Where did you think it would be? Ask me. Root it out. I’d like to know what it is myself.”

 _No matter how good your intentions were, it wasn’t your place_ , that’s what Krista said. What Elliot’s been playing back again and again in his head. But Tyrell is saying yes. He’s offering himself up. His eyes are clear and bright, and he means it. And there are still so many questions.

Elliot takes a breath, and leans to drop his cigarette into his empty glass. It hisses a little in the vodka, but keeps smoking. “Okay,” he says. And says—

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://furs-and-gold.tumblr.com/)!


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